National Poetry Month 2013: Dennis Kirschbaum & The Useless Machine

Poet Dennis Kirschbaum won the "Most Viewed Post" prize for his 2012 National Poetry Month treatise ("treat us?") on writer's block.

Today, Dennis is back and ready to take on the TechnoVerse. I'll just step out of his way...

The Useless Machine

Every age has its idols. Ours is the idolatry of the useful. Oscar Wilde said, “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.” By this standard, civilization has become unforgivable. We do not merely admire that which is useful, we worship it.

Take a look at the modern kitchen. How many useful gadgets to be found there? Coffee makers that grind beans make cappuccino and froth milk at a pre-set time. Microwave ovens know exactly how long to nuke a potato. It goes without saying that most people no longer know how to cook. We defrost, open packages and jars, we call for delivery. Coming soon: Refrigerators that know when you are running low on milk and add it to your shopping list or perhaps just order it directly from the internet. We could, of course, walk though every place in the house, every part of our lives identifying useful things.

Men’s pockets have always been the dominion of the useful. The number of pockets routinely included in our clothes is one of the two truly great things about having been born a male. A man who wears a suit to work could easily have seven or more pockets at his disposal and these days, I need every one of them. Wallet, keys, coin, comb (for a while yet anyway), pens, and a Smartphone. 

Yes, that’s right, that most useful of all objects, the Smartphone. Mine (an iPhone) holds my calendar and address book, more books than I could read in a lifetime, photos of my friends and family, everything good or bad that I have written in the last five years, music and movies, and an app on which I can check off how much I have gotten done (i.e. how useful I have been) today.

This is, of course, the measuring stick of a person’s importance in the 21^st century. It is no longer, how physically attractive we are, not what kind of car we drive, or how much money we have. The new gold standard for success is that we live, in the words of the title of a bestselling self-improvement book, a purpose driven life.

The Purpose Driven Life has its own website!

The Chief Rabbi of the Untied Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks defines happiness as the confluence of three things: something to do, someone to love, something to look forward to. This is an attractive definition because it seems true and is so simple but note what is first on the list. Something to do. In other words, to be happy, Sacks claims, person needs a purpose, some way of being useful to others.

I am not against being useful. Being useful has, well, its uses. Without useful people, we’d have no teachers, no plumbers, no electricians. There’d be no one to deliver the very useful newspaper, pick fruits and vegetables, clean buildings, or secure food and prepare meals. Yet there is something to be said for the useless.

I enjoy a fascination with antiquated office technology. Stuff that was once useful but is, for the most part, now out-moded. I have a Model B Bates Stapler circa 1936 that makes its own staples from a spool of brass wire that still works well and is in daily use on my desk. Fountain pens, can of course, still be used, but what a pain! Cleaning them, filling them, blotting the wet ink on the paper after writing! It is almost impossible to fill a fountain pen with ink without getting at least some ink on your hands and very often your clothes. I use a fountain pen.

Model B Bates Stapler from OfficeMuseum.Com

For the most part, however, the items in my collection share two characteristics. They still work perfectly and are now virtually useless. My 1941 Royal Typewriter, my Dad’s Pickett Slide Rule, an old film camera, a package of carbon paper, all as functional as the day they were made but so cumbersome and inefficient in comparison to the technology of today that they are relegated to a role in which their sole purpose is to be admired. They are useless. In other words, they have become art, which is to say for the most part, they have been forsaken.

Who has time for art, for the useless? In our rush to embrace purpose, we have forgotten pure beauty, the loveliness that comes with being useless. And yet, somewhere deep in its depths, the human soul longs for the useless. And it may not be buried quite as deep as we think.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal documented the quiet return of an object that first debuted in the 1950. Dubbed, “The Useless Machine” it is a device that has no purpose other that to turn itself off after a person has turned it on. 

According to the article, Coca-Cola repair man, Brett Coulthard, of Saskatchewan saw a video of the machine and knew that he had to build one for himself. Perhaps even more remarkable, he thought there might be a market among the like minded and he began selling kits for others who wanted to build a Useless Machine. If you don’t need a kit, but want to build one on your own, Mr. Coulthard will give you the plans for free! Could such a venture be successful? Let’s just say that Mr. Coulthard no longer repairs Coca-cola machines.

That such a venture could be commercially viable I found it at least somewhat surprising. Why? Because though there is a part of the human spirit that is drawn to the useless, we are rarely willing to pay for it. Which brings me to poetry, arguable the most useless of all the useless arts. Poetry is utterly useless.

Generally, how useful something is directly proportional to how many people are willing to pay for it. Cars? Computers? Useful. Many are willing to pay for them. A house? Really useful. Lots of people own houses. (Glass houses less so in our stone throwing society and you see far fewer of them.)

Of the arts, music is somewhat useful for the pleasure it gives, movies for their entertainment value. Paintings can set a mode or a tone or can be purchased for the sole purpose of matching the color scheme of the sofa. Fairly useful. Creative writing, perhaps less useful. Most modern novels are read and toss. Anything older than 6 months sells for a few dollars used on Amazon. Finally, least useful of the useless – poetry.  It is telling, that virtually no one supports him or herself by exclusively writing poetry. Even our most widely known poets, mostly also worked as college professors or in more useful occupations. William Carlos Williams was a doctor. His friend Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company.

This plaque is still at a New Jersey hospital.

 Last year I attended an event at a major DC venue where Billy Collins and Mary Oliver both read from their work. These two juggernauts of poesy were able to gather a nice crowd though the hall was far from sold out as it was when I saw singer-songwriter Randy Newman perform there the year before. But as Collins himself pointed out nearly everyone in the audience was a writer of poetry or at least a writer. Except for people who write poetry, most people just have no use for it. When I told my non-poetry writing friends whom I had seen, most of them gave me blank stares. They had no idea who these writers were. Consider that these are the two most famous living poets working in America today! Try this: ask any friend who is not a professor of literature or a poetry writer to name a living American poet. My experience is that most can’t name a one. In all likelihood many folks can’t even name dead one.

Reading or hearing poetry won’t help you earn more money. It won’t organize your day. It won’t prepare a meal or make a hotel reservation. Rather than make your life easier in any way, poetry actually makes your life harder. It is impertinent, intemperate. It makes demands. It requires you to bring yourself, to complete it, to change, to wonder. It may delight, amuse, or even irritate but ultimately it is like the machine that serves no useful purpose.

So what is the point of art in general or poetry in particular? Or is there a point? Alas, it is another sign of our era that we even dare to ask such a question. Only in the 21^st Century is useless synonymous with pointless. You may as well ask, what is the point of a flower? What is the point of a rock. Or love?

We create art specifically to remind us that not everything must be useful. Form need not follow function. The only point of art is to connect us more fully with our humanity and to express the beauty and existential uselessness of the human condition.

As Wilde concluded in his famous preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

Here is a useless persona poem in which I attempted to channel my inner Wilde.

Holloway Prison, where Oscar Wilde was jailed for indecency.

After Reading Gaol

Prosperity, pleasure, and success may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things…Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

–Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

There are two kinds of gaols.

There is the gaol without and the gaol within.

One confines the body; the other contains the soul.

I believed beauty was an indulgence,

the satisfaction of appetite: a buttonhole of Parma violets,

a handsome young man to be entertained,

a hundred neatly rolled cigarettes from the tobacconist,

my name inscribed on each in gold ink.

Ugliness was something to be hidden and locked away

like a simple woman or a portrait growing loathsome

in a schoolroom at the top of the stairs.

Art was reality. Life, mere fiction.

I finally understand that beauty is a raw thing

and the edges of love are jagged and sharp.

If those two years at Reading

taught me anything it was this:

A bouquet of rotten fruit can smell like heaven.

A cold, wet morning may warm one’s heart.

Only in loneliness are the seeds of repose.

There is beauty in the bud

and the impulse that causes it to open

must diminish it.

by Dennis Kirschbaum

Posted with permission of the author. Watch Dennis read a poem here!

Dennis M. Kirschbaum grew up in Baltimore. He has a B.A. in English from Guilford College and an M.A. in Jewish Philosophy from Baltimore Hebrew University. He is an Associate Vice President at Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life and an Adirondack 46er, having climbed to the summit of the highest mountains in New York State.  His poetry chapbook, Clattering East will be published by Finishing Line Press later this year. He lives and writes in Washington Grove, Md.

Dennis, I think many of us feel--from time to time--that technology is "A bouquet of rotten fruit [that] can smell like heaven."

Tomorrow, poet Regina Sokas explores the global connections the TechnoVerse offers. Regina is compiling a book of found poems, composed from newspaper articles and columns written by her late brother.

Poetry Postcard 32: Airbus A320

Prose poems: poetry or flash fiction? Discuss.

It seems that every time the prose poetry form is mentioned, it comes under attack. Isn’t a prose poem the same thing as flash fiction?

Good question. It’s one of those gray areas of the literary world. I read “The Prose Poem as a Modernist Genre” by Margueritte Murphy. It appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle.

Murphy's anthology of prose poetry.

My take on the article was that the prose poem is about tone. Whether the poem’s focus is on setting, sensory images, or character, it’s all about the mood created.

I have written a handful of prose poems. I tend to use the form for persona poems, written in the voice of an invented character. Is the choice about tone? Possibly. The speakers in my prose poems are invariably younger (under 25) and thinking through a philosophical change triggered by a minor event. (Am I that predictable?)

Not all prose poems work this way. One of my favorites, which combines narrative and character beautifully, is “A Story about the Body,” by Robert Hass. 

It begins, "The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week.  She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and  he thought he was in love with her." (Read the rest of the poem here. Recommended for HS and up only.)

Hass gives us two characters, a setting, and a problem -- all elements of story. So what makes this a poem? I don't have a simple answer.

Vintage Postcard #32

Poetry Postcard 32 was one of my original antique store purchases. (Correction: The card was a donation from poet Patricia VanAmburg, who saved it from a memorable flight with an authoritarian steward.)

When I was a child, we made an annual trip to England, where I have family. Visiting the pilots in the cockpit was always a highlight of the long flight.

But this is our post 9-11 world and pilots are off-limits  to passengers. The image of an empty cockpit intrigued me.

Airbus A320

I been thinking about this Lufthansa postcard for a long time, its empty cockpit full of lights and instrumentation, ‘cause it could be some kind of metaphor for life–God is my co-pilot and all–except the blank windows are wacked, like God’s flying me through heavy fog and even He with a capital H has to turn on autopilot and let the dang computers land this baby, which is fine if you believe God made the rules and stepped aside−now kids, play nice and no biting−if you believe that then He with a capital H can’t change the plane’s increasing velocity, the weather, or even snap his big-ass fingers and halt gravity, but if you don’t believe it, this ends up being a crap metaphor and this flight ends up screwed ‘cause I just got a look at the cockpit and there’s nobody home.

Laura Shovan

Postcard Information:

Lufthansa │A STAR ALLIANCE MEMBER

Cockpit, Airbus A320, Printed in Germany

What is your take on the prose poem/flash fiction debate?

If you’d like to study up on the issue, check out these links:

Poets.org: "Mutable Boundaries: On Prose Poetry"

Bark: "How To Tell Prose Poetry Apart From Flash Fiction"

anthologies:

At Amazon.com

At Powell's Books

At Amazon.com

and online journals:

The Prose-Poem Project, online journal for prose poetry

Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction

Poetry Celebration

Get your tea and biscuits ready. Today, my intern Alissa and I get to visit with our Northfield poets for the last time. It's the third grade Poets Tea.

The children will read their poems for an audience of parents and other visitors. But they also have a chance to travel to other homerooms. There, they will read poems by classmates with whom they don't typically share writing time.

It's often an eye-opening experience for kids. Through poetry, they see a different side of their peers. This is one of my favorite aspects of being a poet-in-residence -- helping the children expand their view of one another as whole people.

Last week, I posted several of the children's persona poems. I saved two more for our celebration. Both of these poems are portraits, but they also have that elusive element... tone.

Hanna's poem reminded me of a poem from A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Swing of Trips 
By Hanna, Grade 3

Up through the air,

she flies in the sky.

She comes over the

grass and comes

back down. She pretends

it’s an airplane

flying and landing

and again fly and

land. Now it’s Florida,

then Wyoming to see

the buffalo. Now

it’s bed till tomorrow.

Where is

she going to

tomorrow?

Hanna captures the flight of the swing, but also how a swing's meditative motion can be a jumping off point for imagination.

Chloe's poem captures a moment. I like how this little poem expresses the happiness we can find in slowing down and appreciating simple things.

Good Thoughts

by Chloe Y., Grade 3

The Happy lady looks out the window.

She thinks what a beautiful day.

Sitting on the bench outside,

Looking up and listening to the birds.

She stands up and picks some flowers,

Then goes inside and gets a vase.

She sniffs the flowers

and thinks good thoughts.

Congratulations, Northfielders. You outdid yourselves with these poems! Thank you for inviting me back again this year. I hope your summers are filled with fun, poet and good thoughts.

Thanks to Kerry at Picture Books and Pirouettes for my Irresistibly Sweet Blog award!

Poetry Friday: "I could steal a friend"

With 50+ inches of snow on the ground, no school, and dangerous roads, this has been a great week to stay in and revise.

What are you working on? My main project for the last 18 months has been a middle grade yearbook-in-verse, THE COUGAR CHRONICLE. It combines persona and occasional poems in the voices of one fifth grade class. (Read past posts about the book here and here.)

The poems are inspired by/draw from Edgar Lee Masters 1915 book, Spoon River Anthology. Imagine you are standing in a graveyard outside Chicago, and as you pass each headstone, the person buried there speaks about who he was, what her dreams were, disappointments, secret loves.

Some of my persona poems relate directly to those in Masters book. Here's a Masters poem, followed by one from THE COUGAR CHRONICLE.

ROBERT DAVIDSON
by Edgar Lee Masters

I grew spiritually fat living off the souls of men.
If I saw a soul that was strong
I wounded its pride and devoured its strength.
The shelters of friendship knew my cunning,
For where I could steal a friend I did so.
And wherever I could enlarge my power
By undermining ambition, I did so,
Thus to make smooth my own.
And to triumph over other souls,
Just to assert and prove my superior strength,
Was with me a delight,
The keen exhilaration of soul gymnastics.
Devouring souls, I should have lived forever.
But their undigested remains bred in me a deadly
   nephritis,
With fear, restlessness, sinking spirits,
Hatred, suspicion, vision disturbed.
I collapsed at last with a shriek.
Remember the acorn;
It does not devour other acorns.

Ashlie's Awesome Acrostic
by Laura Shovan

As President of the
Student Council, T.J. Furst thinks he runs this school.
He's into Democracy. Monarchy is more my style.
Leave ruling the school to me.
I am Queen of Columbia Elementary.
Every kid here knows my name,

So I'm as much a leader as
T.J. Furst.
Even better. I got to the top without one speech.
Politics? I have other ways to keep control.
Half the fifth grade is already
Afraid of me. The other half? Who
Needs those
Idiots and geeks?
Even kids who say they

Hate me wish they could be my friends.
As if. You think you're
Unique? Better watch your back, because I will
Knock you down.

Since it's almost Valentine's Day, I'm sending a heart full of gratitude to some people who have cheered on this project. Children's author Deborah Da Costa gave me an A+ on some early poems. Agent Michael Stearns and author Ellen Hopkins' critiques helped me expand the original idea and focus the narrative.

But super-love to my friend, writer Marjory Bancroft, who has given me both high praise and tough love constructive criticism because she believes THE COUGAR CHRONICLE has something important to say...that kids in fifth grade are "individuals yearning to be seen and desperate to be recognized for who they are."

Thanks to Lee Wind for hosting Poetry Friday today. Share more love and poetry at Lee's site, "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell Do I Read?"

Amok in Revision

When I'm teaching poetry revision to elementary schoolers, I write on the board: Re/vision.

We parse the word. "Re"  means to do again. For "vision," I draw a pair of goofy glasses on the board. Revision doesn't mean editing or proofreading. It literally means to see again, with fresh eyes.

Often, those fresh eyes see something I don't want to look at. Like an entire scene or poem from a book that's not working. Ouch. But my revision glasses work like the glasses I put on every morning. They help me see better. If I tried to drive the story without them, I'd be all over the road.

Today, I'm revising my middle grade yearbook-in-verse, THE COUGAR CHRONICLE.

Here is a persona poem in the voice of a girl from my fictional fifth grade class. My writer friend Marjory Bancroft said, "I got nothing in this poem -- no sense of story, rhythm, character, personality."

Ode to My Twin
By Sydney Costley

I love the whooshing sound
when the glass doors open
and kids rush out for recess.
Basketball, four square, tag,

Double Dutch, monkey bars,
laughing, yelling, running.
But then Ashlie had to start
teaching all the girls cheers.
If Mary Rose wants to
prance around copying
stuck up Ashlie Hauk
I got no time for her.
I told her so.
And she said, "Fine."
I went behind the school to hide.
My sister Sonya followed me.
She said, "Cheerleading's dumb.
I'd rather make a jump shot
than jump for joy when some boy scores."
We played hoops one on one
for the rest of recess, me and my
number one BFF,
sister Sonya.

I sat on Marjory's comments for months, hoping I could rescue the poem. I liked how it described recess, touched on problems Sydney was having with her friend (a thread that shows up later in the story), and developed the relationship between Sydney and her twin.

But the revision glasses told me it was time to chuck the poem and start over.

I used one of my favorite tricks and tried a different form, keeping in mind the story and character elements I liked in the original. So...let's see if an ekphrastic poem will work better for Sydney. She's a hands-on learner, likes phys ed, recess and Art. I took out a Van Gogh portrait that I use with elementary schoolers when we write self-portrait poems. Here is Sydney's new poem.


Self Portrait
by Sydney Costley

Miss Hill said we could make a portrait
just like in art class, except instead of colors
we could use words to make the picture.
And I remembered that portrait
Ms. Musay showed us in Art
where Vincent Van Gogh painted his face green!
Blue green swirls all around him,
vines of blue crawling on his jacket.
It looked like his clothes wanted to move.
I know how that feels.
My name is Sydney.
My color is green.
My words say there is green grass behind me,
under my feet on the soccer field,
under my head when I look up at the sky.
My face has blue lines curving down
when Mary Rose spends recess learning cheers
from Ashlie Hauk instead of shooting hoops with me.
When I'm running, I like the way
the sun shines on my dark blue windbreaker
like waves sliding across the ocean.
I wish I could jump into my portrait poem,
forget about school and dive into that ocean.
I'd swim away.

What do you think? Did the revision glasses do their job?

(Sydney is thinking about playing with the shape of her poem, to give it a swirly feeling like Van Gogh's painting. -- Still revising!)

Poetry Friday Portraits

Portrait and persona poems are endlessly fascinating -- just like the people who inspire them.

One of my favorite poetry exercises for middle school and up: clip photos of people out of newspapers or magazines. Have each student choose one that makes him/her ask, "What's the story here?" Then write an imagining of that person's story.

What if the "person" in your photo isn't really a person?

Maryland poet MiMi Zannino spotted this beauty at an antique market and had to give her voice (and take her picture). Here is MiMi's portrait poem, "Heavy Metal Mermaid."

Heavy Metal Mermaid

You must understand my position

casting me in this untenable pose

wrought into your mermaid fantasy.

Set the pros and cons on scales

and weigh the truth against fiction.

Make a decision before the rust

bleeds into my bronze

weakening my steely disposition.

MiMi is my fellow Maryland State Arts Council poet-in-the-schools. Here at the Maryland Poetry Out Loud finals. You can read her full bio below.

More recent posts on portrait poems:

my poem in the voice of conjoined twins, "Brother,"

Hal Sirowitz's "Crumbs" from Mother Said. (There is another classroom poetry lesson/writing exercise posted with "Crumbs.")

Have a happy Poetry Friday, everyone. More poetry at A Year of Reading. Stop by and visit our hosts Franki & Mary Lee.

Author, educator, and photographer MiMi Zannino has been a poet-in-residence with the Maryland State Arts Council since 1989. Her writing workshops include “Emily Dickinson: Mother of American Poetry” a dramatic portrayal of the 19th century poet. Her books include “Keeping Memories Alive,” an easy-to-use interactive resource for families, grief camp counselors, and school professionals who are helping a child through the emotions surrounding the death of a loved one. Information about her books and programs for adults and children can be found at http://www.memorylanepress.com/ or by emailing mimimsac@yahoo.com.

"If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times..."

Fiction writers can spend hours building characters -- sometimes creating full dossiers before we ever type "Chapter One." (Here's a worksheet, if you're interested.)

So how do poets capture a person in just a few lines? What kind of magic are they working and how can we get some -- or give some to our students?

I'm continuing to look at persona and portrait poems this week. Last week's persona poem, in the voice of conjoined twins, was "Brother."

Here is Hal Sirowitz's wonderful poem, "Crumbs." It's from his hysterically funny collection, Mother Said. This is a great model poem for the classroom and a good exercise for fiction writers.

Crumbs

Don't eat any food in your room,

Mother said. You'll get more bugs.

They depend on people like you.

Otherwise, they would starve.

But who do you want to make happy,

your mother or a bunch of ants?

Read the rest of the poem in an awesome comic-book version here.

Lesson/Writing Exercise in Character Building

Audience: Advanced 5th Grade Writers through Adult

Read "Crumbs" again. Think about a person (or character) who says the same thing, over and over again. It might be a catch-phrase, favorite saying, or pattern of speech when the person's on a tirade.

Your Prompt: Quote someone you know – your poem will tell the reader something about the speaker and how you felt about what he/she said. Trust that the words your speaker is using will suggest the nature of his/her character.

Here are a few lines of a 6th grader's response.

My mother once told me proper punctuation Is key. "Or I’ll never have peace. Why am I so cursed? To have children That can’t spell is worse than having fish

That cannot swim."

Another great example of using someone's words to paint their portrait, Robert Frost's "Blueberries."

Look for another persona/portrait poem on Poetry Friday.

Question & Answer

I'm about to leave for a group reading at the Writers' Center in Bethesda. Reading poems out loud to myself, stop watch ready.

One of the poems I'll be reading is my most widely published...a persona poem called, "Brother." (An odd choice for me, as I'm not a conjoined twin -- but you'll see why I loved Stephenie Meyer's The Host so much.) Most recently, it was published in the Maryland Writers' Association anthology, New Lines from the Old Line State.

Re-reading this piece, I realized that it has themes in common with May Swenson's "Question," posted for this week's Poetry Friday.

Here is "Brother":

Brother “Ahmed and Mohamed Ibrahim – who had been joined at the top of the head – were separated… after neurosurgeons finished dividing the boys’ venous systems and brains.” CNN, October 13, 2003 When did I become aware of my brother? I can feel him only if we stretch our arms overhead at once, our fingers touch. From above my eyes, I hear laughing, crying, words not my own. An echo self? Are there two of me? No. Not me exactly, but me. We are a continuous line, a human palindrome, my twin doing a headstand on my skull where people imagine light bulbs or dark clouds reside I have myself again, but not myself. Has God melded us, or has he never unmelded? Those dancing mitochondria swaying apart have never stopped holding hands. I have been given a word for the voice beyond my sight and would like to face my brother. I have never seen him, except at night when I walk my feet up the crib slats and he walks his feet up the other side. If I raise my eyes almost to their lids I can see – are they his toes? -- moving. And I have no sense of moving them.

I'll be busy this week prepping our regional SCBWI conference, but look for a classroom lesson on writing the persona poem.